be material reasons for the actions of human bodies, just the same as for the moving of billiard balls. We hear the sound of a billiard ball striking the cushion, and we are prepared to accept the idea that the thing we call hearing in us is caused by the impinging of sound waves upon our eardrums. And if we investigate human beings in the mass, we find every reason to believe that they act accord-ing to laws, and that there are material causes for their acts. If you get up and shout fire in a theater, you know how the audience will behave. If you study statistics, you can say that in any large city a certain fixed number of human beings are going to commit suicide every month; you can even say that more are going to commit suicide in the month of June than in any other month. You
can say that more people are going to die at two o'clock in the morning than at any other hour. You know that certain changes in the weather will cause all human beings to behave in the same way. You know that an increase of prices or an increase of unemployment will cause a certain additional number of men to commit crimes, and a certain additional number of women to become prostitutes. You know that if a man overeats, his thoughts will change their color; he will have what he calls "the blues." I might cite a thousand other illustrations to prove that human minds are subject to material laws, and therefore to investigation by the bio-chemists.
But now, stop a moment. Here you sit reading a book. Something in the book pleases you, and you say, "Good!" Perhaps you slap your knee or clench your fist. Now here is a motion of your hand, which stirs the air about you, and which, according to the laws of energy, will spread its effects to the other side of the world, and even to the farthest of the stars. Or perhaps the book makes you angry, and you throw it down in disgust; an entirely different motion, which will affect the other side of the world and the farthest
of the stars in an entirely different way. The machine of the universe will be forever altered because of that slapping of your knee or that throwing down of your book.
And what was the cause of these things? So far as we can see, the material cause was exactly the same in each case--the reading of certain letters. Two human beings, sitting side by side and reading exactly the same letters, might be affected in exactly opposite ways. It seems hardly rational to maintain that the material difference of two pairs of eyes, moving over exactly the same set of letters, could have resulted in two such different motions of the hands. As a matter of fact, the very same letters may affect the same person in different ways. The composer, Edward MacDowell, once told me how on his birthday his pupils sent him a gift, with a card containing some lines from the opera "Rheingold," beginning, "O singe fort"--that is, "Oh, sing on." But the composer happened, when glancing at the card, to think French instead of German, and got the message, "Oh, powerful monkey!" This, of course,
was disconcerting to a famous piano performer, and his pupils, if they had been watching his face, would have seen an unexpected reaction. It seems manifest, does it not, that the cause of this difference of reaction was not any difference of the letters, but purely a difference of thought? So it appears that thoughts may change the material universe; they may break the chain of causation, and interfere with material events.
Compare the two things, a state of consciousness and say, a steam shovel. They are entirely different, and so far as we can see, entirely incompatible and unrelated. Can anyone imagine how a thought can turn into a steam shovel, or a steam shovel into a thought? We can understand how a steam shovel lifts a mass of earth out of the ground, and we can understand how a human hand moves a lever which causes the shovel to act; but we are unable to conceive how a state of mind--whether it be a desire for pay, or an ideal
of service, or a vision of the Panama Canal--can so affect a steam shovel as to cause it to move. We can sit and think motion at a billiard ball for a thousand years, and it does not move; but when we think motion at our hand, it moves instantly, and passes on the motion to the billiard ball or the steam shovel. When fire touches our hand it sends some kind of vibration to the brain, and in some inconceivable way that vibration is turned into a state of consciousness called pain, and that is turned, "as quick as thought," into another kind of motion, the jerking back of our hand.
So it seems certain that consciousness really does "butt in" on the chain of natural causation. And yet, just see in what position this leaves the scientist who is investigating life! Imagine if you can, the plight of a doctor who wanted to prescribe a diet for a sick per-son, if he knew that every piece of chicken and every piece of fish were free to decide of its own impulse whether or not it would
be digested in the human stomach. But the plight of this doctor would be nothing to the plight of the chemist or the biologist or the engineer who was asked to do his thinking and his planning in a world containing a billion and a quarter human beings, each one a lawless agent, each one a source of new and unforeseeable energies, each one acting as a "first cause," and starting new chains of activity, tearing the universe to pieces according to his own whims. What kind of a universe would that be? It would simply be a chaos; there could be no thinking, there could be no life in it; there could be no two things the same in it, and no laws of any sort.
So then we fall back into the hands of the "determinists," who assert one unbreakable chain of natural causation, and regard the human body as an automaton. We go back to the bio-chemist, who purposes some day to ascertain for us just exactly what molecules of matter in just what positions and combinations in the brain cells of William Shakespeare caused him to perpetrate a mixed metaphor. We go back to the belief that human beings act as they must act, because the clock of life, wound up and started, must move
in such and such a fashion.
But now, let us see what are the implications of that theory! Here am I writing a book, appealing to men to act in certain ways. Of
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course, I know that not all will follow my advice. Some will be foolish--or what seems to me foolish. Others will be weak, and will resolve to act in certain ways, and then go and act in other ways. But some will be just; some will be free; some will use their brains-- because, you see, I am convinced that they can use their brains! I am convinced that ideas will affect and stir them, in complete defiance of the bio-chemist, who tells me that they act that way because of certain chemicals in their brain cells, and that I write my book because of other chemicals, and that my idea that I am writing the book because I want to write it is a delusion, and that the whole thing is happening just so because the universe was wound up that way.
Now, this an unsolved problem, and I have no solution to offer. What I have set forth is in substance one of the four "antinomies" of Kant, and you can see for yourself how it is possible to prove either side, and impossible to be sure of either. Perhaps there is really a duality in life. Perhaps there are two aspects of the universe, the material and the spiritual, and perhaps they do not really interact as they seem to, but both are guided and determined by some higher reality of life of which we know nothing. In that case there would really be a chemical equivalent for every thought, and there would be a trace of consciousness for every material atom in the universe. Maybe the theologians are right, and in the universal consciousness of God the whole future exists predetermined. Maybe to God there is no such thing as time; the past, the present, and the future are all alike to Him.
There is nothing more painful to the human mind than to have to confess its own impotence. Yet I can see no escape from the dilemma we are here facing. There is not a man alive who does not assume the freedom of the will, who does not show in all his acts that he agrees with old Dr. Samuel Johnson: "We know we are free and there's an end on't." Without a belief in freedom we cannot get beyond the animal, we cannot become the masters of our own souls. And yet, the man who swallows that idea whole, and goes out into the world and preaches personal morality to the neglect of the fundamental economic facts, the facts of the body in its relationship to all other bodies--we know what happens to that man; he becomes a shouting fool. Unless he is literally a fool, or a knave, he quickly discovers his own futility, and proceeds to use his common sense, in spite of all his theories.
